


Full-Court Press

by beethechange



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: (sort of), Basketball Innuendos for Days, Frottage, Hand Jobs, M/M, Pining, Porn with Feelings, Sharing Clothes, Sorry LeBron, jersey kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 20:17:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16226561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beethechange/pseuds/beethechange
Summary: To be clear, these are not tactics Ryan would recommend. Being an athleisure-obsessed pervert, and lying, and clothes-sabotage: these are not things he’s proud of.But they have undeniablyworked.Shane’s standing next to him in the hotel lobby while Devon checks them all out of their rooms, and he's wearing a sleeveless purple Lakers jersey and the world’s softest, clingiest sweatpants. It’s so exactly as Ryan pictured it, so precisely in line with his fantasies, that he has to pinch himself.***Or: Let’s talk about those jerseys in Ryan Bergara’s closet.





	Full-Court Press

**Author's Note:**

> me: let’s try a short little pwp!  
> also me, 12k later, drowning in feelings and jokes about ball-handling: …or this is fine.
> 
> My love and gratitude to discord friends for general jersey kink brainstorming and encouragement, and to Varnes for the bit about the spiders. “What bit about the spiders?” I can hear you asking. You will know it when you see it. 
> 
> Many thanks to Ryan Bergara for not bothering to hide his basketball jones, and to Shane Madej for not bothering to hide certain other things. In spite of your meaningful contributions to this work of fiction, neither of you are allowed to read it.

*

So, the basketball jersey thing. It’s not a fetish. It’s not a kink. It’s just a _thing_.

It’s just a thing Ryan likes.

They’re comfortable to wear. Ryan likes the fit and the way the material feels against his skin, silky and smooth. He likes to rep his teams around town, to exchange that secret nod on the sidewalk with strangers that says _you’re my people_. He even likes the smell of them, synthetic and plasticky from the decals.

Ryan knows he likes jerseys. You don’t acquire fourteen of them by accident, after all. What Ryan doesn’t know—not until the _exact_ moment Shane lifts his up to wipe his mouth, halfway through the third quarter of the Buzzfeed charity basketball game—is that he _likes them_ likes them. Likes them in a pants-too-tight, breath-caught-in-his-throat, making-dying-weasel-noises kind of way.

Ryan can feel his brain shutting down from lack of oxygen, looking at the inches of sweaty bare torso revealed as Shane uses the hem of his jersey like a towel. He stops in his tracks. The game goes on around him; Steven’s got the ball and he’s looking for someone to pass to, and Ryan ought to be darting around the guy from the social media team who’s guarding him right now, but he isn’t.

Garrick sets a pick for him, and Ryan’s supposed to roll. _You’ve gotta roll, man._

He doesn’t roll. He stares.

 _Oh fuck_ , he thinks. _Ryan, you have to move. You have to move, Ryan. Sports are happening._

_RYAN, MOVE. DO IT FOR SPORTS._

In the end he settles for waving his arms and scuffling around, pretending to be trying to get open without putting any real effort into it. His eyes are still locked on Shane, who’s tugging his jersey back down in place and wiping his hands on the front. His giant, long-fingered hands, tangled in the extra fabric at the bottom of the jersey, and—

And then—disaster! —Shane catches him looking.

Someone fouls Steven and he gets a free-throw. As they’re lining up for the shot, Shane slides in next to Ryan.

“You okay, man? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He grins. Ryan’s mesmerized by the way his sweaty hair flops into his forehead.

There’s a patch of wetness on Shane’s jersey where the sweat has stuck it to his skin, and that’s almost too much for Ryan to handle. His hand twitches with the urge to reach out and touch the fabric there, where it clings. Just to see how it would feel.

“Watching you try to play basketball is like watching a dog drive a car,” Ryan says. “It’s unnatural. I keep seeing you out of the corner of my eye and doing double-takes.”

“What are you talking about?” Shane asks. “This bod was made for ballin’, baby. Ballin’? Is that the thing we ballers say?”

“Oh my God, you’re the worst.”

“Maybe I’ve been wrong about team sports this whole time, Ryan. Maybe I’ll quit the digital media hustle and become a professional basketball player. It was destiny this whole time, and you’ve shown me the light.”

“You’re a disgrace to the noble sport,” Ryan says. The jersey comes to a slight vee at the neck and Ryan is only now noticing how it allows the sharpness of Shane’s collarbones to peek out at the edges, like an elegant frame.

If Ryan doesn’t extricate himself from this situation soon, either basketball or Shane—or quite possibly both—will be ruined for him forever. If he doesn’t get off the court inside the next two minutes, he’s going to have a situation that the flimsy fabric of his shorts won’t be up to the task of concealing.

Steven sinks his free throw and the possession changes. Ryan evaluates his options, all of them bad, and takes the coward’s way out. As he runs back up the court he pretends to trip, sending himself sprawling onto the asphalt.

He thinks it must look fake as hell, the way he dives for the ground like Ronaldo during extra time in the quarters of the World Cup, but Shane’s at his side in a second.

“Hey man, be careful,” Shane says, offering down a hand to pull him up. Ryan’s amazed at the speed and spectacular finality with which his evasive maneuver has backfired.

“Thanks,” Ryan says, taking the hand offered and using it to lever himself off the ground. He fakes a wince when he puts weight on his right leg. “Shit, I think I hurt my knee.”

“Time out!” Shane yells. Ryan considers telling him that he doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally stop play, but Shane is very tall and very white, so sometimes people listen to him and do what he says by sheer force of habit.

The play stops.

Now everybody’s looking at Ryan, at Ryan who is still grasping Shane’s wrist and pretending to gasp on a knee that is perfectly fine, at Ryan who is still pitching half a tent in his shorts. Which is, of course, the exact opposite of what Ryan had intended.

“Okay, come on.” Shane wraps a long arm around Ryan’s waist to support some of his weight, and this wasn’t in the plan either. Ryan can feel the sweaty jersey pressed against his own bare arm and shoulder. At this intimate distance he can smell the way new athletic sport-smells mingle with Shane’s usual spicy deodorant.

Ryan can’t even help it; he groans.

“That bad?” Shane asks, mistaking it for pain. He tightens his grip around Ryan’s waist to take more of Ryan’s weight and helps him hobble off the court.

 _You’re a liar, Ryan Bergara_ , Ryan thinks to himself, clutching at Shane’s side, fisting his hand in the material of the jersey at Shane’s hip. _You’re a liar and you’re going straight to hell and when you jerk off about this later the earth is going to crack open and swallow you whole, and it’ll be what you deserve._

Shane deposits him gently on the bench.

“Somebody get him some ice for his knee,” Shane directs. He bends down to look Ryan in the face, and Ryan has to physically stop himself from cringing away. “You okay?”

Before Ryan can prevent it Shane’s kneeling in front of him, pushing the leg of his shorts up and examining his knee from all angles. Ryan looks down at Shane, at Shane on his knees in front of him _wearing that jersey_ , and he wants to die.

“It doesn’t look swollen or bruised,” Shane says with a preoccupied frown. His fingers turn the curve of Ryan’s kneecap, looking for a hurt that he’ll never find unless he finds a way to prod at Ryan’s brain instead.

“Yeah, I’m fine, just twisted it,” Ryan grunts out. He pulls his leg out of Shane’s hand and waves in the general direction of the hoop. “Go make us proud, you jolly green giant.”

“You know I won’t!” Shane says, and then he’s back out there and Ryan’s free to watch from the sidelines, towel slung over his lap for cover.

Kristin brings him an ice pack. Ryan wonders if anybody would notice if he slipped it under the towel like a makeshift cold shower. Probably they would.

On the court, Shane misses yet another shot. Steven elbows him in the ribs, says something Ryan can’t hear from here, and Shane grins that familiar lopsided smile and shrugs. He wipes his face with his jersey again, pulls it all the way up nearly to his nipples to get at his forehead.

Ryan makes another dying weasel noise and prays that people attribute it to his fake injury. He’s entirely fucked.

He dumps an ice-cold water bottle on his head, and that helps a little.

*

The frustrating part is that this entire thing is a bed of Ryan’s own making. If he could go back two weeks in time and undo it all, he would.

Ryan always plays in the Buzzfeed charity game; it’s for a good cause, he loves the sport, and he loves the camaraderie. He’s short but he makes a decent point guard, and he’s a great shot thanks to years of forcing himself to practice three-pointers in compensation for the height thing.

Shane usually sits it out. His body’s perfect for basketball, but his brain can’t perform the functions necessary to get the body to _realize_ it’s perfect for it. Something must get lost in translation between head and limbs, Ryan thinks, to make someone so tall so bad at it.

There’s got to be a way to unlock that potential. Ryan’s a little obsessed with it, and this is the year he resolves to make it happen.

“No way, man,” Shane says, when Ryan presses him about the game for the fourth year running.

“Come on, dude. Think of the homeless LGBT kids of L.A. They need your weird Larry Bird body to help fund their new community center.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Shane says with a sigh. “Don’t you—don’t bring homeless kids into this, that’s playing dirty and—”

Ryan’s not above playing dirty to get what he wants. And what he wants is Shane on his team, plastered under the basket, arms up above his head, getting every rebound while the other team scurries helplessly around his knees like little mice taking big fat Ls.

“Homeless gay kids, Shane. Some of them are homeless because their parents kicked them out, probably. Imagine if they had a _new community center_ —”

“Fine!” Shane snaps. “Fine, I’ll—fine. You’re a terrible person for using them against me like this.”

“I don’t think they’ll mind as long as we win,” Ryan says, triumphant and trying his very best to conceal it. He knows nothing will change Shane’s mind as quickly as looking too pleased about it, so it’s imperative that he not gloat as much as he wants to.

“Stop smiling,” Shane says.

“I’m not smiling,” Ryan says, erasing every trace of a smile from his face. “I’m feeling very neutral right now. I have no particular feelings about this. Like, it’s…what’s it to me? It’s for the youths, dude.”

“For the youths,” Shane agrees, resigned.

*

After the game, while Ryan’s taking the world’s longest cold shower and ignoring the insistent tug in his gut that is his dick’s way of yelling _notice me,_ he reflects on this exchange, and on the day’s events. He’s starting to realize he very much _does_ have particular feelings about this.

 _Particular pants feelings_ about this.

It really must just be a jersey thing, as opposed to a Shane thing. He’s worked with Shane for four years now, and in very close quarters with Shane for at least two of those years. He’s done athletic things with Shane, even, for videos, and it’s never impacted him like this. He’d know by now if he had a—a Shane thing.

Then again, Ryan’s also been watching basketball and playing basketball and wearing basketball jerseys for most of his life, so at least in theory he should also know by now if it’s a jersey thing.

 _It’s not any kind of thing_ , Ryan insists to himself.

 _It’s_ super _a thing_ , his dick insists back, with equal and opposite force. _It’s our brand-new thing and you’d better get with the fucking program, and if you don’t I’m going to ruin your life. I’m probably going to ruin it anyway._

Ryan sighs. He turns the water to warm. He swipes a little shower gel, closes his eyes, tips his head back into the spray of the water, and lets his hand slide down his stomach to his dick. It’s already fully-hard in anticipation of winning this latest version of an argument it always wins.

He thinks about the sweat dripping down Shane’s neck, disappearing into the vee of the jersey. About the slight curve of his belly, the trail of hair under his belly-button revealed by the jersey pulled-up. About the weight of Shane’s arm around his waist, the big hand on his hip.

He comes in a minute flat, so hard he has to lean against the wall of the shower and so messily he’ll have to scrub the whole thing down. He breathes like he’s run a marathon, like it’s the first time he’s breathed all day, and lets his forehead rest on the tile.

Thank God the next charity basketball game is a full year away. He won’t have to worry about this thing getting traction, building on itself like a tumbleweed rolling down a hill and gathering more detritus to itself until it’s enormous and unmanageable.

 _I’ll make you a deal_ , Ryan tells his dick, a silent fervent promise. _I’ll give you one week to get this out of your system. Then it’s back to our regularly-scheduled programming of Sandra Oh and Gal Gadot and sometimes that chick from the car insurance commercials._

Soon the memories will fade and he’ll be free.

*

A month later, when Ryan finds himself still burdened by an intense out-of-left-field sexual attraction to his male coworker, he’s feeling pretty put-out about it. Peeved, even.

He thought he and his dick had reached a gentleman’s agreement. He should have known it was not to be trusted.

Any illusions of it being _just_ a jersey thing are quickly obliterated. They’re obliterated the minute Shane sits down in his seat the Monday after the game with a quiet _oof_ , stretching so his very normal and not-sporty shirt pulls above his navel, and Ryan almost falls out of his own chair.

“How’s the knee?” Shane asks.

“Terrible,” Ryan mutters. “Everything is terrible.”

In the weeks that follow, the illusions continue to be obliterated every single day that Ryan has to spend in Shane’s presence, looking at his stupid too-big face and his stupid thick hair and his stupid long body and noticing something new that he likes about them.

Sometimes Ryan lies to himself that he’s working through it. That’s what he tells himself he’s doing when he leans over Shane in the canteen to fix the tag that’s sticking out of his shirt, tucking the tag back in and letting his fingers brush against the warm skin at the back of Shane’s neck.

Shane jumps in surprise at the touch, nearly spilling his coffee.

“Hey, you’ve just—your tag,” Ryan says, bewildered by how his own hands have moved without his permission. If they’d do that, what else might they do? That’s a thing to keep an eye on for sure. “Who buys shirts with tags in them, even? I thought snake people killed tags right after we took down Applebees and the institution of marriage.”

“Thanks,” Shane says, grinning up at him and then standing to his full height. “Grown-up shirts still come with tags, Ryan. If you wore anything other than too-small graphic tees you’d know that.” 

“They are _not_ too small,” Ryan says. Shane’s eyebrows go up, his eyes rake over Ryan’s shirt, and Ryan’s goes self-conscious about the way it clings to his newly-embiggened arms and chest. He’s been working out more in the last month, trying to distract his body with forms of exercise that aren’t sex in order to get through the day, and it shows.

It is possible that this particular shirt is too small.

“This one shrunk in the wash,” Ryan says, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Okay, man.” Shane laughs softly, taking a sip of his coffee. “I’m not coming for your baby shirts, I’m just saying. Thanks for the tag-check.”

“You’re welcome.” Ryan’s fingers feel hot where they brushed Shane’s skin and the fine hairs at the back of his neck, growing in long where he needs a haircut. Ryan makes a fist of his hand to rub the feeling back into them.

Every little brush of fingers, every excuse he finds to reach out and touch, digs the hole of Ryan’s interest a little deeper. He’s going to dig all the way through the earth and pop out in China, and as long as Shane never, ever finds out, it’ll be fine.

There’s no reason he would notice. It’s not even that weird, Ryan rationalizes. Just bros being bros, tucking each other’s tags into their shirts, performing little acts of grooming. Keeping it profesh.

*

Sometimes Ryan finds himself doing something so blatant that it’s difficult for even him to excuse away. Something he knows full-well isn’t normal, that’s only feeding his stupid crush instead of smothering it.

For example: A few weeks after LeBron signs with the Lakers, they unveil his new jersey. It’s not perfect—Ryan has some notes—but it’s LeBron, and it’s his Lakers, and Ryan obviously has to have one in every color.

The day it’s available for sale on the website he jumps on it. He orders one for himself in purple and sticks one of the bright yellow ones in his cart too, because he’s trash.

And then, his fingers once more moving completely of their own volition, he adds a jersey one size up in the cart as well. He’s not consciously thinking _I’ll get this for Shane_ —Shane who doesn’t give a shit about LeBron or the Lakers, other than his occasional indulgence of Ryan’s excitement—but he does it anyway.

 _Don’t be stupid, Ryan_ , he thinks. _What’re you gonna do, give it to him for Christmas?_

But he thinks about Shane in that jersey at the charity game, and he contemplates the image of Shane in a Lakers jersey—in a _LeBron_ Lakers jersey—and his dick’s hard again, and he sort of blacks out.

Three weeks later, a package containing several jerseys turns up on his doorstop. Two of those jerseys are in his size, for him. One of them’s a size up and it’s for Shane, although Ryan doesn’t know how to get him in it just yet.

He’ll come up with something.

*

Ryan mulls it over for quite some time, and it turns out there’s no good way to ask your friend to put on a Lakers jersey for you because you get off on it without revealing that you are in fact getting off on it.

He considers getting himself tickets to a preseason game, and then pretending he won the tickets, and then finding a way to convince Shane to accompany him.

He thinks about scheduling a fan meet-and-greet at a Lakers event for some reason, but he has no idea what the reason might be, unless the Staples Center is haunted. The idea gives him a little thrill, sexually-charged in a way he does not care to examine further. One weird new sex thing is quite enough for now, thanks. Two, really, if you count dicks.

He thinks about asking Shane to wear the jersey for a promo pic for Unsolved Sports Conspiracies. This presents the added benefit of allowing Ryan to photograph Shane _in the jersey_ under the warm blanket of plausible deniability. It also doesn’t make sense, because Shane’s not in Sports Conspiracies, because Shane hates sports.

In the meantime the jersey hangs Ryan’s closet, mint condition, tags still on. He’s not quite ready to pull it out of the closet and into the world, but he likes knowing it’s there. He likes it at night, hand around his cock in the dark before he falls asleep, thinking about asking Shane to put it on. He likes it during the day, too, when Shane smiles at him just so, or laughs at one of his jokes, and Ryan allows himself to imagine a version of his life where Shane might agree.

It’s sort of an apt metaphor, that jersey in the closet. Ryan wishes he was brave enough to do something about it.

*

Ryan’s packing for a shooting trip for the upcoming season of Supernatural, throwing clothes into his suitcase with haphazard abandon because he saved it for the last minute as usual. He doesn’t know how to pack for October in the Midwest, where it could be eighty-five degrees or it could be forty-five degrees and nobody knows but God.

They’re flying into Omaha, renting a car, and road-tripping the rest; nearly a full week of travel where they’ll film three episodes right in a row. Ryan’s looking forward to being trapped in a car with Shane for the better part of a week, and he’s also dreading it.

Somehow, in all the flurry, clothes flying everywhere, the jersey winds up in his suitcase. Looking back, Ryan can’t remember making the decision to pack the jersey. There’s the slip of nylon through his fingers, wrapped up in another shirt and then gone.

There’s no plan for the jersey. It’s not a _plot_. It’s just a hope.

*

The trip is torment.

Ryan gets to the airport and Shane is wearing these sweatpants that he should feel embarrassed about having on his person in public. They’re unbelievably soft-looking, fitted close to Shane’s legs, and Ryan’s pretty sure he can see the faint outline of something at the crotch without even looking too hard for it.

He feels like a real creep anyway. Analyzing Shane’s pants like they’re concealing a dick mystery he longs to unravel is probably beyond the pale.

It’s a miracle that Ryan makes it all the way to Nebraska without asking Shane about the pants, without reaching out to touch the fabric to see if it’s as soft as it looks, but he cracks when they load up in the rental car for the hotel.

“Where do you even find pants like that to fit you, long-legs?” he asks, hoping it sounds light and casual and not at all like his own jeans are cutting tight against yet another boner. He’s starting to get used to them now; they’re simply a part of his body when Shane’s nearby and doing something he finds especially attractive, such as speaking or breathing or moving. “I didn’t know they made joggers for Ents.”

Shane looks down, where a patch of ankle is showing under the cuff of the pants. “I mean, they’re a little short. Comfy, though.”

“Can I—?” Ryan asks, sticking a hand out to feel before he even realizes he’s doing it. _Hands, stop that, stop it right now._ “I might be, um, in the market for new joggers. These ones are…they seem nice.”

“Sure,” Shane says, already paying attention to his phone again, slipping a headphone in his ear and popping a handful of pumpkin seeds in his mouth.

Ryan reaches over and touches the fabric, above Shane’s knee but not so far above it as to seem suspicious. The fabric is, indeed, as soft as it looks. He rubs it between his thumb and forefinger, feeling the warmth of Shane’s thigh under his hand.

Nothing to see here. Ryan’s just comparison-shopping for soft pants by touching the ones currently on his buddy’s body. Women do that shit all the time, which he expects is why all women’s clothing is so fucking soft. What Ryan’s doing here, this is _advocacy_.

The material is _so_ light and cottony under his fingers. Ryan wants to rub his face on it.

Ryan’s not sure if his hand shakes or if he makes an involuntary noise, but when he looks up again Shane is watching him. There’s nothing accusatory there, nothing suspicious. Just polite curiosity.

“Is something _wrong_ with my pants, Ryan?” Shane asks.

“Nothing,” Ryan answers honestly. “They’re perfect,” he adds, _too_ honestly.

Sure. That’s a normal thing to say.

Shane narrows his eyes at Ryan, like he’s trying to figure out if Ryan’s making fun of the pants. Ryan offers back a bland smile, a blank nothing of an expression, and prays that Shane can’t see through it to the barely-concealed quiver of his feelings.

“Right,” Shane says after a moment. “Well, they’re from Uniqlo, so.”

It’s not until later that night, Shane snoring away from the other bed, when Ryan considers what it might be like to see Shane in the jersey and the soft pants _at the same time_. It would probably kill him; he would expire right on the spot and go straight to whatever hell’s reserved for freaks who spend entire car rides eyeing up their friends’ groins to see what kind of heat they’re packing.

Shane’s not a paper doll. Ryan can’t put Shane in whatever clothes make his dick hardest and call it a day. Even in his own head it feels invasive.

He rolls over and tries to go to sleep, tries to ignore the thrum of possibility and arousal trickling through his veins. He stays awake for a long time, listening to Shane’s snores and his steady in-and-out breathing.

*

That resolve is admirable and it lasts exactly six hours, most of which Ryan sleeps through. It evaporates the following morning, when Ryan wakes up to find Shane already awake, rifling through the cabinet by the closet.

The first thing Ryan sees when he cracks open his eyes is Shane’s ass and legs for days, encased in _those pants_ and he’s pretty certain no underwear. The soft morning sun’s catching at his hair and making him look glowy and otherworldly. Ryan’s into that.

Half-asleep as he is, driven mad as he has been over the last several months by the most pathetic kind of lust, Ryan doesn’t think he can be held _entirely_ accountable for what happens next.

“We overslept, and there’s no coffee in here,” Shane grumbles, noticing Ryan’s awake. “I’m going to run down to the front desk for some. We’ve gotta be on the road in fifteen.”

“Cool,” Ryan says, his voice coming out a sleepy croak. He coughs and tries again. “Cool, thanks. I’ll shower, I guess.”

The minute Shane leaves the room, Ryan bursts into frenzied action. It’s as if he’s been possessed by a ghost whose unfinished business consists only of very soft pants and very silky Lakers jerseys with the number 23 on them. It’s conceptually perfect, and now he just has to execute.

The way to get Shane in the jersey, and to keep him in the pants, is to render all his other clothes unwearable. Why didn’t Ryan think of it before? It’s so perfect. So simple. So elegant.

Frantic, Ryan grabs armfuls of Shane’s clothes and dumps them in the bathtub. He turns the shower on, watching with grim satisfaction as all of Shane’s clothes—except for one pair of underwear and one pair of socks, Ryan’s not a monster—get completely drenched.

He might cackle like a supervillain, but nobody can prove it.

It’s only after he’s done, once the adrenaline has started to fade away and he’s sitting in a cold sweat on the closed toilet, that Ryan realizes he has absolutely no excuse at the ready. In under five minutes Shane will be back in the hotel room expecting to be able to get dressed, and Ryan has no explanation prepared for why he will not be able to do so.

All the giddiness drains out of him, leaving only dread and guilt and _extreme_ shame in its choppy wake.

*

Shane gets back a few minutes later. He knocks on the door for Ryan to open, balancing two cups of coffee precariously. Ryan’s never had a great poker face, and he can tell his expression gives his despair away by the concerned glance Shane shoots him as he eases past him into the room.

“Ryan, what did you do? Why are you looking at me like you ran over somebody’s pet?”

“Something happened,” Ryan says. And that’s true enough—something _did_ happen. Technically he _made_ something happen, but the passive voice feels much safer.

Now he has to find the magic combination of words to explain it to Shane, the ones that will result in Shane not hating him forever and quitting the show and moving back to Illinois to live among normal people who do not sabotage his wardrobe out of deranged sexual obsession.

“What happened?”

Ryan gestures to the bathroom, where Shane’s clothes are now hanging from the shower curtain rod and dripping sadly into the tub.

Shane surveys the scene. He goes back out into the room and rifles in his suitcase. A moment later he returns to stand in the bathroom doorway.

“Ryan,” he says, very slowly. “Ryan, why are all my clothes—my clothes which were safely packed in my suitcase—wet?”

Ryan opens his mouth, miserable, ready to tell the truth. Instead, the most absurd lie pours out.

“There was a spider.”

“There was a spider,” Shane repeats.

“There was a huge spider, _two huge spiders_ , in your suitcase,” Ryan says, literally doubling down on spiders.

“There were two huge spiders in my suitcase?” Shane asks. He looks confused, but not mad yet. Ryan’s sure he’ll get there.

“I was barely awake and I, I panicked. I thought maybe they were a mom spider and a dad spider and they’d laid eggs in there, I wanted to get rid of the spiders and the eggs and I—the shower—I threw your clothes in the shower and I turned the water on. To kill the spiders and the baby spiders,” Ryan says, all in a rush.

Shane’s eyebrows go all the way up, incredulous.

“You threw all my clothes in the shower because you thought a spider couple had done the do in them and you had to kill the whole spider family.”

“I…yes,” Ryan says, hearing how hollow the excuse sounds, how absurd. Every time Shane repeats his nonsense back at him in that dry voice, Ryan feels his shoulders hunch another notch with the shame of it.

The only thing that might possibly save Ryan now is that Shane thinks a lot of the things he believes are stupid. Ryan doesn’t think Shane thinks _he’s_ stupid, but he does assume Shane has a little box in his head labeled “Ryan Allowances” where he compartmentalizes that shit. Maybe, just maybe, he can convince Shane to put this in that box.

“So where are the spiders now?” Shane asks. “Their…corpses, or whatever.”

Ryan’s about to say they washed down the drain, but then he realizes that would belie his declaration that they were huge spiders.

“I don’t know. They’re in the wind, I guess. Maybe they crawled off to die together, arms in arms.”

“So you saw the spiders, and you panicked, and you threw all my clothes—including the spiders—into the shower and you turned on the shower and you didn’t even successfully get rid of the spiders? And now you do not know where the spiders are and you think they might be Romeo and Julieting somewhere?”

“I got rid of them in the sense that they’re not in your clothes now,” Ryan says. “I’m really sorry. I wasn’t thinking, obviously.”

 _You know how I can be_ , he wills. _Scaredy-cat Bergara, who acts first and thinks later. You know this is bullshit, but if you cut me this slack I’ll never ask for anything from you ever again._

Shane sighs. “It’s—it’s fine. We can drape them out and hope they dry out enough on the way to the shoot, I guess. I’ll wear this on the road.” He sniffs at his armpit. “I just wish this shirt didn’t smell like airplane.”

Ryan stares, open-mouthed, as Shane blunders directly into the fruition of his mad unformed plan.

“Well…” Ryan says, as if it’s only occurring to him now in this exact second. “I did pack a shirt that would probably fit you, if you want.”

“Thanks, man.” Shane’s distracted, wringing as much of the water out of his jeans as he can. “I appreciate it.”

*

To be clear, these are not tactics Ryan would recommend. Being an athleisure-obsessed pervert, and lying, and clothes-sabotage: these are not things he’s proud of.

But they have undeniably _worked_.

Shane’s standing next to him in the hotel lobby while Devon checks them all out of their rooms, wearing a sleeveless purple Lakers jersey and the world’s softest, clingiest sweatpants. It’s so exactly as Ryan pictured it, so precisely in line with his fantasies, that he has to pinch himself.

“What I can’t figure out,” Shane says, “is why this jersey fits me so well. Isn’t it long on you?”

“I like a, um, roomy jersey,” Ryan says. “So I can wear shirts under them in the winter. Gotta get that year-round use out of a shirt you pay that much for.”

“You live in California,” Shane points out. “And also, why were the tags still on?”

Shit. Ryan must have forgotten to pull the price tag off.

“It’s new,” he says, which is, after all, true. “I was saving it for the first game of the season. There’s something magical about a virgin jersey. Good…good juju.”

Shane’s eyebrows go up at that, and Ryan wishes he hadn’t said it. When he dies—and it _will_ be today, one way or the other—he’s going to go to his grave with regrets.

“Sorry for popping your jersey’s cherry, I guess,” Shane says, running his hand down the jersey’s front, tracing the yellow numbers there. Ryan can feel his throat closing up. He’s about to asphyxiate when TJ turns up, back from packing up the car, and gets him off the hook.

“Did you lose a bet?” TJ asks, eying Shane’s ensemble. “Are ghosts real, then?”

“There was,” Shane says wryly, “a _spider_.”

“Two spiders,” Ryan corrects. He’s in it now; might as well be all in.

“Ryan thinks they were in love.”

“Sure,” TJ says, not bothering to ask, as if it makes perfect sense. More likely he just doesn’t care. “Okay. Bags?”

Ryan sneaks another look at Shane as they load into the car. He’s not built, but his arms are defined and nice-looking in the jersey, sinewy and appealing when they stretch and move and lift. The jersey falls perfectly to his hips, transitioning like a silky purple waterfall into the coziness of the pants. Ryan’s aware that it’s a dumb and weirdly specific thing to be into, but he’s so, _so_ into it.

Shane looks—not like himself, obviously, but like himself filtered through Ryan’s exact aesthetic, through everything that Ryan associates with comfort and happiness and the pleasurable strain of muscles.

It’s the only thing Ryan wants to look at ever again, and he files it all away, every single detail, for later recollection. His heart twists in his chest, a sharp wanting so near to pain that it almost scares him.

Obviously this whole thing was a mistake from beginning to end, but Ryan hadn’t counted on it being a mistake in this _specific_ way, this way that hurts him almost as much as it attracts him.

“Now what?” Shane asks. “I know I look ridiculous, but you can close your giant fish mouth already.”

Ryan clamps his mouth shut.

“Ha ha, yeah,” he says. “Ridiculous.”

*

Valentine, Nebraska is a teeny tiny town in the middle of nowhere, tucked into beautiful green rolling hills just turning to brown. It’s about the quietest place Ryan’s ever seen.

“There’s a river around here somewhere too, and a wildlife refuge,” Ryan says. “Lots of outdoorsy stuff. And if you cross the border into South Dakota you’re on reservation land.”

Shane’s eyes light up. Ryan can tell what he’d really like is to blow off the episode and go find some nature, and no small part of Ryan wishes they could too. The mental image of Shane, looking like _that_ , wearing the blissed-out, peaceful smile he always reserves for outdoor pursuits, sends Ryan’s heart skittering for cover.

 _Oh help_ , Ryan thinks. _Help, help, help._

“We should have some time tomorrow,” Ryan promises. “We’ll find you a good hike.”

Coming in, they drive up the main drag: lots of tiny locally-owned shops, a diner, a used bookstore. They pass a tchotchke woodworking shop called Wooden It Be Nice, and Shane loses his entire shit laughing. “ _Wooden_ it be—Ryan, I love it here, let’s move. I’ll open a bakery that sells only baked goods my grandmother stole from _Good Housekeeping_ in 1950, and you can open up a ghost-busting business.”

Just for a moment, Ryan wants it so badly he can almost taste it. He can picture it so vividly that he has to bite his lip to stop himself from saying so.

When they pull into the location, an old school building that used to be Valentine Public School and is now a local museum called Centennial Hall, Shane’s whistling the Beach Boys under his breath.

Shane’s clothes still aren’t dry, and it’s certainly not because Ryan sort of folded them in on themselves when he helped Shane lay them out across their luggage in the back to air-dry. Ryan would never.

“Shitty luck,” Shane says, prodding at the wrinkled, still-damp button down and jeans. “I’m going to look so dumb this episode. At least I’ll be comfortable, I guess. This jersey’s not so bad, I sort of get why you like them so much.

“I think it’ll film okay,” Devon says, squinting into the camera. “The purple might be hard to see in bad lighting, but it is what it is. It’s not like you can film shirtless.”

 _Can’t he?_ Ryan thinks. A thrilling new direction for the show. They’d win five Streamy Awards. They’d win _all_ the Streamys, maybe.

“What if we…didn’t have bad lighting?” Shane asks. “Just spitballing here, but they do make lighting rigs. Imagine with me, friends.”

TJ whistles and pretends not to hear him as he unpacks the car.

Shane doesn’t seem too bothered about wearing the jersey on camera, and selfishly Ryan’s thrilled. He’ll have the footage now, proof for his future self that this wasn’t all a wild fever dream turned wet dream. Whatever happens next, whatever cosmic consequences come for him, he’ll have that.

*

“This is the oldest standing school building in the state,” Ryan says, for the benefit of Shane and the camera. “It’s on the National Register of Historic Places, which is basically this national list of important old places, by nerds, for nerds. It was closed to students in the late ‘60s, and by the mid-80’s it was such a shitpile that they were going to tear it down until some _more_ nerds swooped in and saved it.”

“Good work, nerds,” Shane says, giving a thumbs-up.

“Yes, your people. Saving old buildings so jerks like me can go stomping through ‘em, looking for ghouls.”

It’s a weird building, Centennial Hall. The bones of the school are evident in every room, but like Colchester it’s a working museum as well, a palimpsest of times and uses laid one on top of the other to make for a space that’s old and new at the same time.

As befitting a small town, Ryan doesn’t think most of the objects on display are of any particular historical value. It’s a hodgepodge of memorabilia and things the town’s old people left to the museum in their wills, arranged by room in more-or-less chronological order.

There’s one room that’s got nothing but a bunch of rocking chairs in it. Shane sits in one and rocks tentatively.

“They say that sometimes these chairs move on their own,” Ryan says.

“Couldn’t be because they’re on rockers, could it?”

“Even rocking chairs shouldn’t rock all by themselves, asshole.”

Shane looks around as they leave. The pensive expression on his face is incongruous with the bright purple sheen of the jersey, with his bare arms.

“I could believe this room might be haunted, if any place could,” he says. “So many ghost butts, sitting in here, forever rocking.”

“That’s beautiful, man.”

There’s another room devoted entirely to bells of all shapes and sizes, up to and including an enormous old church bell. There are nearly two thousand bells in the one room alone; Ryan’s never seen so many bells in one place, and he’s never spent this much time thinking about bells, or saying the word _bells_.

“Sometimes in this room people report hearing—”

“Oh, don’t tell me!” Shane exclaims, reaching out to flick a bell with his fingernail as he passes. “Bells ringing? Am I right, Ryan? Is it _bells_? Do I win a prize?”

“You win this,” Ryan says, raising his middle finger.

“This is the weirdest museum I’ve ever been in,” Shane says. “This whole town’s like a funhouse version of Pleasantville. I’m into it.”  

Ryan’s not quite as into it—he thinks it’s pretty creepy. Not necessarily _haunted_ creepy, he hasn’t come to any conclusions about that one way or another yet, but definitely land-that-time-forgot creepy.  He’s into how much Shane is into it, though. He’s into that a _lot_.

Shane’s always been attracted to the weirder parts of the human experience, to odd collections and nostalgia and forgotten things. Ryan loves to watch him moving around, touching things he shouldn’t be touching with careful, reverent hands and scaring away all the ghosts with his enthusiasm.

Ryan wonders if Shane might touch him like that.

In the music room they get to the meat of the ghost business at last.

“In the 1940s, a female student died here at the school,” Ryan says, laying out the lore. “There’s very little real information available about it. All we have in the way of proof is the obituary of a girl named Margaret Anders, who died at Valentine Public in 1941. Cause of death unknown.”

“Was it _murder_?” Shane asks, wiggling his fingers around. “Poor Mags. Taken too soon, before she could become Rosie the Riveter.”

“The local legend is that she died of a heart attack, due to poison. That somebody poisoned the reed on her clarinet. Rough stuff.”

“Hear that, kids? High school band kills, just say no.” Shane points at the camera. “Fun parties, though, if you like making out indiscriminately with people who have superior tongue strength and excellent breath control.”

“Gross,” Ryan says.

“I played trumpet,” Shane says with a wink at the camera. “Not to, ah, toot my own horn.”

“Grosser,” Ryan says, but of course he’s lying again, and now he’s thinking about Shane’s tongue strength and dexterity. “I bet you get stuck tooting your own horn a lot.”

“Wouldn’t you like to know. If I played clarinet I’d say _greasing my own cork_. There’s some woodwind humor, you’re welcome.”

“I hate you,” Ryan says with a low chuckle, because he can’t say _please take me now_ either on camera or off.

Ryan shuffles around the room with some dowsing rods for a while, Shane just off his shoulder making color commentary about how stupid dowsing rods are and how unlikely ghosts are and how Margaret probably choked on one of those weird aspics with ham and pineapple suspended in jelly.

“I have to say, Ryan, the poisoned reed thing? It just seems like an unnecessarily complicated way to kill a high-schooler. Teenagers are dumb-dumbs, they’re all about ten minutes away from getting themselves killed in some natural way. If I wanted to murder one I’d step aside and let ‘em get on with it.”

“The music room’s got the most reported activity,” Ryan insists. “People hear music playing and stuff. Seems like she wouldn’t bother if she choked on a grape or whatever.”

“What, high school band music, like the clarinet part from _Peter and the Wolf_? I dunno, Ryan. Sounds like bologna.”

And it’s true—Ryan listens for a long time, sitting stubbornly alone in the dark, but he doesn’t hear any music.

*

Considering the rocky start to the day, Ryan’s managing pretty well. Shane’s spirits are high, and Ryan thinks he’s done a decent job of not staring at Shane constantly, and he’ll take the W on both counts.

He’s just starting to get cocky about it when they go investigate the detached gymnasium, an eerie outbuilding of the old school, and it all goes to hell.

Ryan can tell it’s going to go badly for him the minute they walk through the creaky double doors and onto what is essentially a basketball court circa 1955. Ryan’s already sweating when Shane pivots at the three-point line and mimes taking a jump shot.

All six feet and four inches of him sails in the air, jersey flapping around his torso, and now, _now_ Ryan hears the music. It’s the synth-and-strings-laden 80’s jam that plays at the end of _Hoosiers_ , when Jimmy sinks the game-winning shot at the buzzer and every dude on the team piles on top of him, and it’s playing on loop in Ryan’s brain as Shane lands back on the line.

“Ryan? You look like you’re gonna barf, man.”

“M’fine,” Ryan mumbles. “Feels haunted in here.”

“You know what’s funny?” Shane asks, ignoring this. “We’ve switched places.”

Ryan’s not equipped to deal with whatever bullshit’s about to come out of Shane’s mouth. He can tell, from the glint of Shane’s eyes from several feet away, that it will be a disaster.

“Hm?”

“Well, in high school I was the band nerd and you were the basketball jock. Now you’re a soft little guitar bro who sings his feelings and I’m—whatever this is,” and Shane indicates down at his jersey and sweats, and Ryan’s brain breaks in half right down the middle. The half that contains all his motor skills and vocabulary falls away, and the half that controls his dick takes over.

_There are cameras on you right now, Bergara. Multiple cameras. He’s standing right there, waiting for your quip. You have to say words now, or everyone will know._

“Calm down there, High School Musical, it takes more than putting on a jersey to be an athlete,” Ryan says, but his voice is weak and crackly and lacking its usual force.

“I just need the tiny 1950s basketball shorts and the illusion will be complete,” Shane says. “Can you imagine all that thigh?”

Ryan can. He _can_ imagine all that thigh.

He needs to cut Shane off now, but for some reason he doesn’t, and Shane goes on, “We should’ve gone full costumes for this one, Ryan. I could have gotten little shorts and you could’ve worn my letterman jacket. Maybe a poodle skirt. Missed opportunity.”

Ryan is suddenly and painfully aware that he’s _still_ not saying anything, and his face is hot. He doesn’t think Shane or the cameras or the people behind the cameras can tell he’s got a semi right now, but he’s also not sure about that.

Shane waits a couple of beats for a joke, or a laugh, or anything. When he doesn’t get it, he takes a nice long, careful look at Ryan, right in Ryan’s face.

“Okay guys, we’re going to do a lock-in here,” Shane announces, and he gestures for the door. “Teej, Dev? Ten minutes.”

“That’s a long time for a lock-in, are you—” Devon starts.

“Ten minutes,” Shane says, firm, still looking at Ryan. Ryan can feel all the eyes on him, so many pairs of eyes, but he can’t make himself meet any of them.

“Ten minutes,” he agrees.

*

“Ryan,” Shane begins the minute the doors close behind the crew. “Are you scared right now, or are you…not scared?”

Ryan swallows hard.

“I’m scared?” he tries. “I’m extremely scared. Um. How ‘bout those…ghosts.”

Shane shakes his head, not buying it.

“Fine. Fine. I’m not scared,” Ryan admits.

Shane closes the distance between them, turning off his body camera on the way. He guides Ryan to the bleachers, sits him down with a push on his shoulder, and turns Ryan’s camera off with a cautious, searching hand at his chest.

“Okay, what’s this about? Please stop blushing and darting around and just…open your mouth and say words. Truthful words.”

Ryan sighs. This is the end of the line for him, he knows. He can’t lie to Shane’s face, not when Shane is being so earnest and considerate. He can’t tell such a huge lie here on this lovely old basketball court, which might as well be a sacred space to him.

“It’s the Lakers jersey,” Ryan says. “And the—the all of this,” he gestures at the court, at the baskets, at the bleachers. “And it’s also the _this_ ,” and he gestures at Shane’s entire self, head to toe and back up, with a helpless wave of his hand.

Shane’s quiet for a long moment. Ryan can see his fingers moving in the half-dark, smoothing at the fabric of the jersey like he’s trying to identify the source of the magic it holds for Ryan.

 _You, idiot. You’re the source_.

“You played that one pretty close to the chest,” Shane says at last.

“Yeah, well.” Ryan shrugs. “It’s sort of new still. I’m, I didn’t know what to do about it. So I figured doing _nothing_ would work, and that did work for a while, until.” He reaches out to touch the jersey.

“I bet I know what that’s about,” Shane says, a smile in his voice. “You were a baby jock in high school, but not really, right?  The whole time you were secretly hiding a nerd heart and a nerd soul in the body of a jock, faking it until you made it, hoping none of the cool kids would notice. The jersey gets you going because you wanted that so badly. That easy, uncomplicated cool.”

That wasn’t what Ryan had been expecting to hear, but it has the undeniable ring of truth to it. He squirms under the feeling of being so seen. He shrinks a little under the weight of it, but Shane reaches out to tug his back straight with a firm yank on his jerry-rigged body cam harness.

“You can just be both,” Shane says. “It’s okay to be both. You get to be whatever you want now.”

“I know it’s okay to be both,” Ryan says, and he understands they’re not talking about a binary of sports or band geeks, jocks or nerds.

“I know you know,” Shane says. “But you look like you could use a reminder. Because it’s, like, the one perk of adulthood. Doing your taxes sucks. Back pain sucks. The hangovers _suck_. But being your whole self and not giving a fuck, that’s pretty great.”  

“Also,” Ryan adds, because it’s getting a little too real, “people in jerseys are hot. And I can definitely see the outline of your dick in those joggers, and that’s not my fault, and I wouldn’t be a friend if I didn’t tell you this truth. You can’t wear those sweats in public, man, seriously. I have no idea how they’re gonna edit it out of this episode.”

Shane throws his head back and laughs for a good long time.

“Come on,” he says, once he’s laughed his fill. “We’ve got to get some lock-in footage, or Teej will be so mad.”

“Oh shit,” Ryan says. The wrath of TJ is not to be trifled with.

*

Ryan’s not entirely satisfied with this conversation, in the sense that it does not end with Shane grabbing him by the face and making out with him for a very long time.

But it also went a lot better than it might’ve done, in the sense that Shane doesn’t seem to have put all the pieces of this thing together to reveal Ryan for the horny, inept schemer he is. And he doesn’t seem grossed-out, or disappointed, or any of the other worst-case scenarios Ryan’s been dreaming up for how this might go.

By the time they get back to their hotel room, a Comfort Inn on the outskirts of Valentine, Ryan thinks he’s out of the woods. This reflects, as he should have known, a fundamental misunderstanding of Shane. Shane is a patient man; he knows how to pick his time. He won’t rush a conversation just to get it over with.

 “The only thing I can’t figure out,” Shane says, hanging up some of his still-damp clothes so they’ll dry by morning, “is that you said you were saving your virgin jersey for the first game of the season. But the first preseason game was Sunday, which I know because you posted an Insta story about it. And the regular season doesn’t start until October 18, which I know because I looked it up in the car on the way to Valentine this morning.”

“Uh.” Ryan hadn’t counted on Shane being willing to go so far as to Google the Lakers’ schedule, and he’s almost touched until he understands that it was in service of out-shooting him at the buzzer.

“So I guess I’m wondering what this jersey was doing in your bag in the first place.”

Shane hangs his last shirt up in the closet and plucks at the jersey on his chest. He takes a few steps toward Ryan, his hands clasped behind his back. Ryan would bail, he honest-to-God would, except Shane is blocking his path to the door.

Ryan realizes then that Shane’s known or suspected about the clothes-sabotage all day: the entire time they were filming, the entire time he was gently psychoanalyzing Ryan in an old high school gymnasium. The entire time he was smiling and joking and carrying on like normal.

Shane has been playing chess, and Ryan’s been playing checkers. Ryan’s been playing lazy half-court zone defense and Shane’s gone for the full-court press.

“Oh. Well,” Ryan says, but there’s no point coming up with some new excuse or digging his hole deeper. There’s no point at all.

“There were never any huge spiders, were there, Ryan? You engineered this whole thing.” Shane still doesn’t seem mad, but Ryan’s not sure he can trust his own perception.

“There were no spiders of any size,” Ryan admits. Why bother to lie? It’s only Shane’s mercy that matters now. “It was…a moment of bad judgment. It was just me, in the bathroom, with the sexual distress.”

“But _why_?” Shane presses forward again, as if this is the crucial point, the piece he still doesn’t have. Which is confusing to Ryan, who thought this was the one piece Shane _did_ have.

“Because of _all the_ _sexual distress_ ,” Ryan repeats. “I don’t know, man. I’ve spent the last, like, three months fixated on the idea of you in a jersey, ever since the charity basketball game. And I was doing okay with it, but the pants were the last straw. These aren’t excuses, I know what I did is fucked up, but—”

“Please stop saying sexual distress,” Shane interrupts. “I get that part. But why the elaborate scheming? You’re no good at it, man. You can’t think on your feet worth a damn. Arachnids, really?”

“Because the truth is _so_ embarrassing,” Ryan says, like this is the most obvious thing in the world. “I assumed…”

He trails off, because in truth there was no one thing he’d thought Shane would do or think or say. He’d automatically assumed that any outcome would be a bad outcome. In retrospect this may have been unfair to Shane, who is kind and level-headed to a fault.

“You could have talked to me, Ryan. I’m not wild about the lying, but the thing that drives me seriously fucking crazy about this is that you thought it was better to do this whole production than to just _trust me_. You could have just asked me to put on the stupid jersey.”

“You—but you—you hate sports!” Ryan sputters nonsensically. He’d fantasized about an alternate reality in which he could simply ask Shane for this and Shane would be down, or even into it himself; he’d never, not for one second, considered that that reality might be _this_ reality.

“Yeah, I don’t give a shit about sports. I give a shit about _you_.”

Ryan can’t do this sitting down. He has to get up and pace, has to run out some of his pent-up nervous energy around the lap of the hotel room. Shane perches on the side chair to give him the space to do it.

“You’re telling me that I could have asked you to indulge my dick and wear the jersey and you’d have …done it? That’s not a normal thing that friends do for friends.”

Shane rakes his hands through his hair so it’s standing up at all angles. He takes off his glasses, rubs at his tired eyes, and puts them back on.

“No, it’s not a thing friends do for…Ryan, you fucking, you oblivious idiot. I’d take a swan-dive off a cliff if you asked me nicely and threw in a smile. You think that’s not embarrassing for _me_?”

It takes Ryan a full lap to process that, and when he does he trips over his own feet and sends himself careening into the TV stand, the corner jabbing him in the thigh.

“But I—ow, fuck, _fuck,_ ouch!  You’re so impassive, how can you just sit there and…”

Shane raises his arms in a shrug. “Because we’re adults, Ryan. This is what adults do. We can either repress this shit and never talk about it, or we can sit here and talk about it. Those are the options. I’m not gonna pass you a note that says ‘do you like me, check yes or no’ and then watch you write in ‘maybe’.”

Ryan can feel the rebuke in Shane’s voice, imply that tossing all of his clothing in a running shower was the histrionic, attention-whore equivalent of writing in ‘maybe,’ like it was Ryan’s attempt at absolving himself of having to decide. And honestly: fair.

“I was so, so scared, dude,” Ryan says. “I thought I had everything figured out and then bam, out of nowhere, this whole new _thing_ swoops in and changes my whole—the whole game. I didn’t tell you because I was scared.”

Shane’s face softens.

“I get that, I really do,” Shane says. “You haven’t cornered the market on confusing secret feelings.” 

Ryan knows, from years of compiled evidence, that Shane is not perfect. But sitting there in that jersey, saying things that make the anxiety in Ryan’s ribcage slow its quiet fluttering, that make him feel normal again, Ryan thinks there’s a chance he might be kind of perfect.

Ryan shouldn’t press his luck. He’s gotten away with a lot today already. But he doesn’t know how to _not_ press his luck, with a streak like this.

“I would check yes,” Ryan blurts out. “If you passed me that note right now I would check yes. And then I would run away from you and avoid you for a while, probably, but then I’d come find you in the—in the locker room or the band room or whatever, and I’d…”

He trails off, because he’s said too much, but it’s too late. Shane’s eyes have taken on a dangerous knowing twinkle.

“Oho! Ryan,” Shane says, sounding surprised and maybe even a little delighted, and he thinks for a minute. He slumps back in the chair and spreads his legs wide; a lazy, bro-ish posture. And then: “Good game, Bergara. Nice hustle out there. Great ball-handling skills.”

Shane makes an apologetic face, like he’s sorry it’s the best he can do, as if he doesn’t realize those are the greatest three consecutive sentences Ryan’s ever heard in his entire life. Ryan can’t believe this is happening to him. Karmically-speaking, it’s more than he deserves.

He takes a deep breath.

“You’re not so bad yourself, Madej,” Ryan says. “Nice man-to-man defense. I like the way you force backcourt violations.”

Shane’s eyebrows knit together. “It means—” Ryan hastens to explain, but Shane holds up a hand.

“I don’t need to know the real thing.”

“Right. Sorry.”

Ryan steps closer, until he’s standing bracketed in between Shane’s thighs. He still doesn’t know how to do this, exactly, but the sports talk is undeniably doing it for him, making him feel more comfortable even as it makes his pants much less comfortable.

 _Have I been into this the whole time?_ he wonders, taking in the slumped forced-casualness of Shane’s shoulders, the way the jersey’s riding up a little at the stomach.  

“I dunno, something about a rimshot? That’s a thing, right? I might be out of sports innuendo,” Shane admits, and Ryan bends down— _down_ , which is a thrill in itself—to kiss him quiet.

Ryan closes his eyes, smelling the barest hint of the day’s sweat on Shane’s skin. He fists both his hands in the jersey, that cool clench of nylon under his palms and pooling around his fingers, and for a minute he’s seventeen again and getting everything he never even knew he wanted.

Then Shane deepens the kiss, reaches around to grasp the back of Ryan’s thighs and pull him in closer, gathers Ryan up and pulls him into his lap, and Ryan’s definitely twenty-seven and not seventeen.

For a while there’s only heavy breathing, and Ryan’s heart beating in his chest and Shane’s heart beating in his, close enough that Ryan can feel it through the jersey and the fabric of his own shirt.

Ryan’s just about done pretending not to want what he very much does want, so he finally gives his hands free-reign to do their worst. His hands take him up on the opportunity; they creep up under the hem of Shane’s jersey to rest on either side of Shane’s rib cage, a bracing point so Ryan can shift his hips carefully _down_.

Shane pulls back with a groan. His hair’s still all wild and his mouth is so red, Ryan can’t stop looking at it.

“Ask me,” he says, hands firm on Ryan’s waist to keep him in place while his own hips work up to meet Ryan’s. “Ask me the thing you should’ve asked me months ago. Ask _me_.”

For a moment Ryan’s confused—a lot of the blood that should be powering his brain has vacated the premises for more interesting southward territory—and then he gets it. Shane’s a good actor; Ryan doesn’t even notice it until the bro-character falls away and Shane’s entirely himself beneath Ryan.

“Shane, I’ve got this thing. It’s a sex thing.”

“Yeah?” Shane asks.

“I was wondering if you’d put on this jersey for me. At the charity game, you were so hot, I can’t stop thinking about it. I don’t know what it’s about, but I was hoping you might help me figure it out.”

“Yeah,” Shane says, breathing hard through his mouth, panting as Ryan’s hands run up his sides to his chest. Ryan’s thumbs brush over his nipples and he bucks up a little, which is more rewarding than Ryan was expecting. “Yeah, Ry. I’ll put on your dumb jersey.”

And then he’s tipping Ryan to the side and standing up, moving away. It’s exactly the opposite of what Ryan wants and he lets out a little grumble, but Shane’s holding up a finger and his face says _trust me_. Ryan’s really got to be better about that, so he settles into the chair.

Shane turns away for a second. He runs his finger through his hair, straightens the jersey, steels his shoulders, and adjusts himself in his pants. Then he faces Ryan again to let him get the full effect, as if Ryan’s seeing him in it for the first time.

And it is a _full effect_. Shane’s visibly hard in the sweats, and Ryan takes in the whole of him, the long line of his cock under the thin material, the stretch of the jersey at his chest, without having to pretend he isn’t looking. If Shane’s nervous, Ryan can only see it in the joints of his extremities; in the clench of his toes into the hotel carpet and the crook of his fingers as they wind into the elastic drawstring at his waist.

“What do you think?” Shane asks, spreading his arms wide. “Live up to your expectations?”

“Oh God, it’s—yeah,” Ryan says. His mouth is desert-dry.

“Show me how much you like it,” Shane says, his eyes dropping to Ryan’s crotch. “Touch yourself and tell me what’s so good about it.”

For a second the fear rises up in Ryan again, fear and disbelief and the now-familiar confusion of wanting something so different so _much_. Then he’s scrambling out of his pants, kicking them off and sending them flying in the general direction of the bed, and shoving his underwear down too.

Ryan gets his hand on his dick, which has been waiting not-so-patiently for this all fucking day and also for months, and a sudden calm comes over him. It’s the clarity that sometimes clicks into place when they’re filming, when they’re performing for the camera and TJ is laughing silently behind the rig and Ryan can tell every bit is landing.

It feels like teamwork, and Ryan is just now—only _right this minute_ —putting together that the things he loves about basketball are all the same things he loves about working with Shane.

“I—I like how the fabric of the pants clings, I like that I can see everything but also not?” he says, and Shane reaches down to palm at his dick through his sweats, encompassing that long line with his palm and squeezing.

“What, this old thing?” Shane asks. “I’ve had it forever.”

Ryan laughs, twisting his hand around himself. “And the jersey, it makes me think of how I feel when I play. I like the endorphins, and the nerves, and the joy when I score.”

“And the belonging,” Shane says, too canny, as ever.

“And the belonging,” Ryan agrees. He wishes it wouldn’t be over so soon, that he could do this all night to see where it goes, but he can’t keep it up for long. Already he can feel the warmth building in his pelvis.

“So why me in the jersey?” Shane asks, and his voice doesn’t _sound_ any different but Ryan’s on alert nonetheless. He forces his hand to stop moving, sensing that this is about sex but also something more important than that.

“I don’t know, I like…I like your arms, and I don’t get to see them that much usually. I like how casual it is, when you’re usually pretty formal. And I like this part right here,” Ryan reaches up to where the vee of the jersey would land on his own chest, “the collarbones, the neck, I don’t—”

Shane’s hand comes up to touch his skin, where the jersey reveals it. “Yeah?”

“I think I like it because it’s you,” Ryan admits. “And not the other way around.”  

“Oh Ryan.” Shane’s eyes go wide, like he wasn’t expecting it, and then he’s fumbling for the strings of his pants again, pulling them down and off. “Please come here.”

Ryan tugs his shirt over his head and scrambles to his feet. Shane goes to pull the jersey off, and his hands freeze on the hem of it.

“On or off?” he asks Ryan, and Ryan hears himself moan. “On then,” Shane says with a low, knowing chuckle.

Ryan lets himself be pulled down on the bed, lets his body roll up to meet Shane’s again and again, his chest rubbing against the silky material of the jersey. It’s not sophisticated, it’s not neat. He hasn’t had sex with this sort of overwhelmed, fumbling ineptitude in so long that he’d almost forgotten how thrilling it can be.

Shane rolls them over so Ryan’s on top.

“Don’t wanna crush you with my big weird body,” Shane says. It’s too bad—Ryan kind of wants to be crushed by his big weird body, was kind of into how different it felt to be so much smaller in bed. He only has time to be disappointed for a second, though, because Shane is reaching to get a hand on his dick.

He feels— _encompassed._ With Shane’s hand on him, big and surprisingly steady, a good firm grip, he hurtles toward orgasm. In no time at all he’s squirming against Shane’s hand, diving into the tiny vee of the jersey to press his face there at the base of Shane’s throat. 

“You wanna come on the jersey?” Shane asks, and his voice is so rough Ryan almost doesn’t recognize it except for the smile playing there.

“Oh fuck,” he whimpers, because until Shane said it he wasn’t even aware it was a thing he was allowed to want. He sits up a little, to give Shane’s hand room to work. The jersey’s already rucked up around his stomach; Ryan pushes it up a little further, baring Shane’s belly button and several inches of skin above it.

Shane’s hand tightens on him. “Thought you might. Don’t let me fuck up the angle.”

In his head, Ryan says a brief but sincere apology to LeBron James, who is a GOAT athlete and by all accounts a decent human being.

He arranges himself across Shane’s hips, judging the distance as well as he can by the metrics of his own body, and Shane’s hand moves faster.

Ryan reaches his hand down, grasps it around Shane’s on his dick to help correct the angle, and for some reason that’s what does it—the feeling of Shane’s hand under his, coupled with Shane’s hand around him, tips him over the edge.

He comes with a hoarse sort of rattle from deep in his chest, all over Shane’s stomach and the rucked-up hem of the jersey and the upper curves of the number 23.

“I hate how hot this is, fuck you,” Shane groans, and then he pulls Ryan back down and close against him and ruts up once, twice, three times—and he’s coming against the tops of Ryan’s thighs, a completely unfamiliar sensation that Ryan’s too surprised by to decide how he feels about it.

They lie there breathing together for a moment, and then Ryan unsticks himself and rolls away. He starts to laugh.

“What’s funny?” Shane asks, but he’s already snickering too.

“We just had sex in a town called Valentine, so, you know, _everything_ ,” Ryan says, “but specifically I was thinking about how we deflowered that jersey.”

“No jersey has ever been less of a virgin than this one,” Shane agrees. “Good juju all over it now. Sorry if we wrecked it.”

“It’s nylon and plastic decals, it’ll wash out,” Ryan says with authority.

“You say that with the confidence of one who has needed to wash jizz out of many a jersey.”                                                                                           

“I mean. I don’t know about _many_ , but—no, shut up, stop it—"

Shane laughs, and laughs, and laughs.

*

The next morning, early, they drive out to [Cowboy Trail](http://outdoornebraska.gov/cowboytrail/), a hike Ryan found on his phone last night while Shane was sound asleep next to him on one of their room’s two double beds. 

“Cowboy Trail!”

“I know, dude,” Ryan says.

“ _Cowboy Trail_ , Ryan! This is the best. They might as well have called it Things That are Good for Shane Madej and Exactly His Entire Shit Trail.”

Ryan’s pleased to have found it: a trail that winds along the route of the old Northwestern railroad, dotted with old covered bridges and trestles. Walking it with Shane is like walking with a dog; every once in a while Shane will find a piece of the old tracks or a rusted-out rail spike and get distracted, pulled off the trail until Ryan can coax him back to it.

Shane’s wearing his own clothes again, maroon chinos and a dark blue button-down. He’s got his sunglasses on against the mild early morning sun, and the light’s bringing out brown-gold-red flecks in his hair that would match the leaves if they were here three weeks later.

Out here it’s right that Shane should look exactly like himself. Getting him out here in that jersey would be like Ryan wearing a button-down on the court.

Ryan leads them to the trail’s crowning glory, the quarter-mile trestle bridge that spans the Niobrara River outside of Valentine. Somewhere along the way they’ve converted it to a footbridge so you can walk the length of it, suspended a hundred and fifty feet in the air, just the river below you and nothing but green hills and blue sky stretched out in every other direction.

Shane stops at the foot of the trestle, as soon as he can properly see where it’s going.

“Ryan,” he breathes out, reverent. He’s so quiet out here, like he’s in church. Ryan feels enormously proud to have played a part in the making of that sound. Hearing his own name said like that makes his knees wobble.

It’s ridiculous to him now, to look back and remember that at one point in the not-too-distant past he thought this was about a _jersey_.

“Oh,” Ryan says, getting a good look at Shane’s wide-open face and understanding. “This is your basketball. This is the court, for you.”

“I guess it is,” Shane agrees, staring down at the rushing river below, at the trestle bridge stretched out before them, out and out and out.

“Not a team sport,” Ryan says, a little wistful. Shane must pick up on it, because he tears his eyes away from the vista long enough to look at him. Shane shakes his head, smiling big.

“Nah, it can be a team sport,” Shane says. “We’re here now, aren’t we?” He reaches down for Ryan’s hand, winds his fingers through Ryan’s, and leads them out onto the bridge.

The beginning is pretty good already, but view from the middle, so Ryan’s heard, will be breathtaking.

*


End file.
